LISA O

I tore down the garage last fall. A literal garage. It wasn’t ‘my’ garage, it wasn’t the garage I left behind in Muskoka that Rob called his ‘shop’, his space. Yet it was the garage here at my new home in North Bay.

It was an old shell of a building that the house flippers had thrown a little lipstick on to make look pretty for me, the prospective buyer. A garage that likely once had an old boy who tinkered with perhaps his lawnmower, or other such small engines. It smelled of oil and engine grease, that smell of a ‘hard day’s work’ reminding me instantly of my Grandpa Smith tinkering in his shop. I smell it, and I see his smile and hear his laugh.

While this is a very pleasant memory, this garage wasn’t Grandpa Smith’s space. This garage had no purpose in my new life. So it had to go.

The process had to be thought out carefully. I’m in a city, neighbours in close proximity, and a plan to rebuild something new had been hatched. Permit in hand, contractor hired, and then watch the building disappear.

What remains is space.

The next day, a sunny fall morning, I sat on the Coffee Porch with a strong dark coffee in hand. My thoughts focused on what happens next when I heard an unfamiliar voice.

“Just wait till you come around the corner, you will see. It was there yesterday on yesterday’s walk” — the voice coming from a young dad carrying his son’s school bag. They came to the driveway and stopped, not seeing me sitting on the porch.

The boy exclaimed “oh wow Dad it is all gone!! I wonder what we will see the next time we walk by” and they started walking again on their journey to school.

I smiled into my coffee. While a new and bigger ‘garage’ is what they would see on a future walk to school — inside will be a space for me.

A place to lift heavy things, and maybe put a few down too.